


A Wish and a Dream

by ShyZombie



Category: NieR: Automata (Video Game)
Genre: Epilogue, Post-Ending E (NieR: Automata), Reference to the Nier Automata Concert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:54:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26592472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShyZombie/pseuds/ShyZombie
Summary: "...Nines?"I smile."Good morning, 2B."
Kudos: 9





	A Wish and a Dream

My name is 9s. Rolled out ----- bunker time. I was born at the tail end of the ----- machine war, and was one of the few who lived to witness its conclusion.

Why was I alive?

I watched my friends die laughing and screaming. Some of them, I put down myself.

I too was killed countless times in the service of humanity.

(Glory to mankind.)

("We need a god worth dyeing for.")

I know some of the truth now. My activation date is not correct. I am much older than I thought.

I wake up in the open air. The light above me is bright. It melts with the blinding white that is behind my eyelids. I can remember a voice in the white, or rather a meaning, deeper than any vibration that could be generated within my auditory sensors.

It was a voice I recognized, hated in its origins- or at least it should have been. It's presence had invaded my own prone thoughts once before, flayed me and laid out bare things I wouldn't even admit myself.

(Maybe he was right. Maybe we aren't so different after all.)

(How easy it was to find solace, purpose in hate.)

Yet there was no hate anymore, nothing but an enveloping peace. It streamed through me like light like I wasn't really there. Or maybe I was everything at once.

Could the network really be this kind?

No, I hadn’t been copied anywhere. They were projecting themselves into me. Otherwise things would probably make more sense. Otherwise it wouldn't feel like I was dying.

The peace was not disrupted by this thought. It occurred to me the peace might be here to allow me to make an objective decision.

"Will you come with us?"

Adam asked, from the idea of light in the idea of his face, also at peace. Eve was cradled gently in his arms, as if asleep.

They were neither far nor close to where I lay in the void. They were everywhere. I could see them perfectly in their entirety as if they were schematics uploaded directly into my mind.

Still, I tried to crane my neck to look up. It just didn't feel right to die will-less and inert, like a cast aside doll.

"I'll stay."

The words weren't a product of physical speech, of artificial lungs or static and backup speakers, but it still took effort to form them, to think them, to pull together the strands of my identity as 9s long enough to answer.

"We Yorha have no right to remain in this world."

There was nothing left for me here, and yet here I was, perpetuating a cycle of pointless, misdirected punishment. Old habits die hard I guess. 

Their presence pulled away like a deflated wind, and I thought I felt something else slip by me and into the stars, out of my reach again. Forever.

There's peace in that, too.

"So that's where you were, 2B."

2B had been many things to me over many lifetimes. She was the line between love and death and hate. All I ever wanted was a companion. Even if that companion was only the reaper looking over my shoulder, I...

I could die for an ideal like that, at least once. Maybe more than once.

I wondered how many times I had smiled in the face of death before. I wondered how many times I had gotten to look her in the face.

My wondering blurred to white to nothingness.

Then, like no time had passed in the space between nothings, to that face again.

***

Now.

The ground is different underneath me. It isn't nothing. Neither is it the artificial smoothness of the tower.  
  
It is cement, cracked and rough through my jacket and the synthetic skin of my legs. It feels like home- not like the bunker, but of days spent fishing under the dappled sun. I look into the face of 2B and that feels like home, also.  
  
My hand reaches out to touch her face, like I have before. Like before, it doesn't feel real. It (the hand) shakes a bit, though there is nothing wrong with it. My focus moves inward, and a quick internal diagnostic confirms it.

The virus is gone. I think. 

Though considering recent events, I suspect it may be able to lay dormant for a time. Wincing, I resolve to do a more thorough check later.

I flex my arm- my other arm, the replacement I had crudely welded to my flesh now pristine and factory new and of my own model.

I push myself up on both my arms.

What rushes through my head is like whiplash, after the light and the blood and my thoughts chafing like grating static. 2B, whole and breathing even in her inactive state, looks out of place in the familiar ruins.

I touch her face like she might fall apart, and then turn her head over in my hand. That's when I see it. 

"A lunar tear..."

I feel my eyes well.

_A lunar tear can grant your deepest wish..._

"It's really you."

A drop slips under my visor, and lands on her face. Her eyes flicker open.

"...Nines?"

I smile.

"Good morning, 2B."

I swallow roughly after that.

She straightens her back with a smooth grace that I missed.

The crushing embrace comes too quickly for me to see coming, and it's more a lurch, so juxtaposed against her normal composure it would steal my breath even if it didn't strangle me.

"I had a dream. You wouldn't wake up..."

The girl that cries into my hair should be hard to reconcile with the warrior I knew, but it isn't. It's the realest thing I've seen for a long time.

I choke out a laugh.

"What are you talking about 2B? You're the one who had me worried..."

Her grip tightens on my shoulders even as the rest of her pulls away. She looks me in the eyes, and I feel naked even behind my restored visor.

"I was there. I was there the whole time, inside A2."

I stiffen at the name.

"And then, after that..."

She strokes my head. Then her hand drops, and her head turns to take in her surroundings.

Her brow furrows.

"I was going to use the core. It felt real."

"I'm awake now, 2B."

But I'm also brought back, for a microsecond, to my impression in the tower; the way pulling away from the network felt like pulling away from 2b. The memory slips away just as quickly, like petals on the wind. 

It doesn't matter now, I tell myself. Dreams shouldn't matter, and isn't that thought surreal the more I think about it. Before this, it would have seemed a wonder that we could dream at all. How things have changed, and so quickly.

Maybe the dream really was a memory, some piece of data left over from a former life. If Yorha is really what I think it is, what the network thinks it is, than 2b has also died many more times than she knows.

But it doesn't matter. This time is different. It's different because we're here together, after the end, whole and alive and 2B has a Lunar tear in her hair, and I know what it means. 

I grab her hand.

"I'm real. We're both real."

For now, so is her smile, and that is enough. 


End file.
